The Move - Part 658 - the Ikea factor

Our get-together saw us heading to Ikea for some additional storage space and ideas for our fabric design. Aside from the list (always a Kalax with inserts) we found great plastic sheets that are textured on one side, smooth on the reverse and perfect for a lot of our printing. Take two please! We work with our own fabrics, our own designs and it's great to walk around the textiles area and look at the shapes, the scale, colourways of different fabrics. No time for coffee just a quick trip with a list and lots of "oh wow" before we headed back to Forest Lake. My putting-it-together skills with Ikea are such that the new storage cabinet was put together in under 30 minutes. The final boxes are unpacked and now I just need to sort everything into logical spaces and places. Another day ...

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Making progress Trees #2

It's all in the background - designing substrate

Scaling up an image of the Brisbane River to develop the substrate for a new art quilt. Each square needs to be 6cm x 6cm to make a finished size of 5 cm square. I created a "to scale" model of the finished quilt on drafting paper. I printed an image of the river (attribution below) and then scaled it up to get a fairly accurate flow across the quilt. The substrate rightly tells the background story. It is the foundation on which the main elements or features reside. So it isn't the "hero" of the piece - it needs to be recognised and visible without overwhelming the piece. I can now easily identify which squares hold a section of the river and start to experiment on piecing, applique, fusing, printing, and painting to learn which gives the best outcome for the substrate. (Brisbane River original image: Magpie Shooter; edited version Paulguard at en.wikipedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/indix.php?curid=9724127) My foundation piece might well end u...

The mess before the beauty

The excavator's words have stuck in my head, rent free. ' I have to make one hell of a mess before it can become beautiful. There is no beautiful end without the mess '. Or words to that effect. The retaining walls at the back of the house have to be finished before anything else can happen in the yard - and in between downpours, a few expletives and more rain, it has beena testing time for all involved in the construction. I thought about his words - and the effort of making a quilt from scratch. The planning, drawing, testing, dyeing, playing, creating, starting again, creating and the final 'ah ha'. There is so much 'mess' before a quilt is resolved becomes a thing of meaning and beautiful in its own way. Blessed are the excavators.

Ali George Artist

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